The House of Representatives passed a legislative package Wednesday evening in a 222-209 vote, putting Congress one step closer to ending the federal government’s longest shutdown in history.
President Donald Trump signed the legislation, which first passed the Senate on Sunday, into law late Wednesday night.
One policy expert told Inside Higher Ed that he expects to see little operational change for institutions as the government reopens. But he and others will be paying close attention to whether the Trump administration follows through on one of the bill’s key compromises: reversing the most recent round of federal layoffs.
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Part of the package would fund the Department of Veterans Affairs, military construction, the Department of Agriculture, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Congress through the end of the fiscal year. But it only appropriates funding for the Department of Education and most other agencies until Jan. 30, using what is known as a continuing resolution. For the most part, the CR gives agencies access to the same levels of federal funding as the last fiscal year.
Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education, said because some of the Education Department’s staff continued working throughout October and into November, not much will change for colleges and universities.
“Financial aid was being disbursed, student loans were being serviced, all those things. So there probably won’t be an immediate significant shift,” he said. “It will, of course, be important for [grant] programs who have not been able to contact program officers with concerns or questions to have staff now available to them again. But that’s probably the biggest thing.”
Fansmith also noted that some education benefits for military service members, which in many cases have been disrupted and backlogged due to staffing shortages, will take some time to get back up to speed.
The 4 Parts of the Stopgap Bill
“There are veterans who have housing benefits and education benefits and all sorts of assistance that they’re using to fund their educations that have just not been coming through over the last six weeks,” he said. “And even when they turn the government back on … that backlog has only grown in the interim. So it’s not going to be an immediate resolution.”
Senate Democrats also negotiated with Republicans to reverse Trump’s latest round of layoffs in the stopgap bill. Theoretically, the legislation should reinstate more than 460 Department of Education employees within five days of it being enacted.
It mandates that any employee who was subject to a reduction in force during the shutdown “shall have that notice rescinded and be returned to employment status.” (The majority of those employees were tasked with overseeing federal grant programs for both K–12 and higher education.)
But Rachel Gittleman, president of the Education Department’s union, argues the language in the bill doesn’t do enough to protect public servants. She worries that saying staffers must be “returned to employment status” could allow Education Secretary Linda McMahon to place union members on administrative leave and not actually put them back to work.
“The Trump administration has shown us repeatedly that they want to illegally dismantle our congressionally created federal agency,” she said. As such, “We have no confidence that the U.S. Education Department will follow the terms of the continuing resolution or allow the employees named in October firings to return—or even keep their jobs past January.”
Fansmith is also skeptical department employees will return to their jobs.
“[The administration hasn’t] shown much willingness to follow what the law requires. So I would absolutely assume we should expect to see efforts to further reduce staffing,” he said. “They’re not hiding the fact they’re trying to do it, and they don’t have a lot of compunction about the methods they use to do so.”
A department spokesperson, however, told Inside Higher Ed that all employees—both those who were furloughed and those laid off during the shutdown—will return to work, as they remain employees of the department.
The department also pointed to a ruling from the federal district court in Northern California that blocked the reduction in force in late October, saying that under that order, all employees who received a RIF notice during the shutdown remain employees of the federal government.
Inside Higher Ed reached out to multiple Republican and Democratic lawmakers in both the House and the Senate to ask about the concerns Gittleman and Fansmith raised. None responded prior to publication.
